Fragments of Cassandra

They say
you don’t know what you have
until it’s gone.

I’ve always wondered
what that says about the living.

What does it mean
when a person can spend years
asking to be seen,
only to become visible
through their absence?

A strange thing happens
when nobody listens long enough.

You stop speaking.

Not because you have nothing to say,
but because every unanswered sentence
begins to feel like evidence.

Evidence that your grief is too quiet.

Your love too ordinary.

Your existence too familiar
to be noticed.

And then a terrible thought emerges:

What if the only voice people truly hear
is the one that has gone silent forever?

What if absence is the loudest language
a human being can speak?

History seems to suggest as much.

Flowers arrive too late.
Words become kinder.
Memories become brighter.

People suddenly discover
entire galaxies inside someone
they once reduced to a passing star.

I do not know why we wait.

Why a heartbeat
must become a memory 
before it is treasured.

Why people search so desperately 
for meaning in a grave 
when there was once 
a living soul asking to be understood.

And what a strange obsession we have with the dead.

We gather around tombstones
studying a name,
a pair of dates,
a sentence chosen by survivors,
and convince ourselves
we have understood a life.

We speak of who they were.
What they loved.
What they meant.

Yet how often did we ask
while they were still breathing?

How often did we mistake familiarity
for knowing someone?

It fascinates me;
that people will spend years
trying to decipher a life
from a tombstone, when they never bothered
to read the person standing in front of them.

Maybe that is what hurts most.

Not the loneliness.
Not even the feeling of being unseen.
But the suspicion
that the world would finally stop
and examine the shape of my existence
only after I was no longer here
to witness it.

I carry that thought around
like a stone in my mouth.

Heavy.
Unanswered.
Impossible to swallow.

Because if they would love me more
in my absence,
what am I supposed to do
with my presence?

And I have never found an answer.

Only the question



Ad she’nipagesh shuv,
The Mourning Bird